An Ambulance Without Sirens
by orionshuntingdog
Summary: [[She shakes her head in utter bemusement, and they pretend for a moment that they are not in a vehicle of the dead and the dying, and that he is not slowly disintegrating, and that her heart is not breaking for him.]] My take on what happens on the ambulance ride Sherlock and Molly share. Spoilers for episode 4 x 02 - The Lying Detective.


**A/N: Thanks so much for clicking and reading!**

 **Wow, wasn't that last episode brutal! I still don't think my brain has recovered (or ever will, if I'm honest).**

 **This is my first Sherlolly fic! As part of my serious denial about Sherlock/Irene being set up again (ughhhhh), here is my take on the ambulance ride Sherlock and Molly shared, that we never got to see (yet another sigh). As usual, I use scientific procedures with a lotttt of artistic licence and inaccuracy – despite doing two science A levels. I'm not entirely satisfied with how this came out, but I hope you enjoy it.**

 **Reviews are better than Sherlock's hair ruffle.**

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"Please, I've just been striding around for the past twenty minutes; I _don't_ need any assistance to climb into an ambulance _I_ called." He snaps, waving away the assistant paramedic.

He climbs in with her into the vehicle, and despite his previous protests, he leans against her very slightly as he does. The gesture is barely perceptible, but she can feel the slight shake in him, and she presses her lips tightly together. She can hear what else it says, the unspoken: _I'm here, still alive, I promise_ and the _I don't need help, but I do._

His blue coat clashes horribly with the green and yellow as he lies down. She takes the seat next to him, and as the ambulance begins to move she just stares at him, all of him. The heavily dilated pupils, the blood red rimmed eyes, the face unshaven for weeks, the hands so resolutely _not_ trembling (she sees it, of course). Her mind flashes back to all the experiments at Barts left unattended, all the missed calls she left, all the unanswered doorbell rings. And even further back, to the set of hard resolve in his eyes after she had fully shown him how much his using had hurt her. He never wanted me to see him like this again, she realises, not after last time. And yet again a small piece of her splinters for this difficult, proud, hurt, and so very _human_ man.

And he stares back, at this woman whose sleeves are fraying because she fiddles with them too much, whose forehead is creased into worry lines, but whose gaze is so resolute, so determined. The sheer potency of the care in her eyes almost makes him flinch. He has always been able to deduce her, but has never quite managed to understand her. Questions surface in his mind, always the same ones, and always the ones he has never been able to ask or answer. Why does she forgive him for the pain he inevitably inflicts on her? Why does she always come back to help him? Why does she waste her emotions on so undeserving a man?

He is the first to look away.

"No point slapping me again." He states, fixing his gaze on a spot behind her. "Wouldn't be nearly as satisfying as the first time."

"For who?" She inquires, voice full of resignation.

He looks at her, and the ghost of a smile plays about his lips, "For both of us."

Her face softens at that. She had often wondered if he had resented her for it, been certain of it at times, but she had known he had needed it, and now she understands he knew it too. Part of her wants to pursue that line of enquiry further, but she pushes it away, as she always does, and focuses on the task at hand.

"You've brought a sample with you?" She asks, beginning to take out the small bottles of chemicals, pipettes and spot plate that she had complied into a make shift analysis kit.

His voice is defensive, "What I choose to put into my body is my own business."

"No, you phoned me two weeks ago to be here, which makes it _my_ business." She says, exasperated, "Plus, you're not the type to bore yourself with something on the high street you've done hundreds of times before, and given your fascination for Chemistry, you've made up something yourself – and I don't think you'd want your hard efforts to pump something so _uniquely_ poisonous into your veins to go unnoticed."

He notices the bitterness in her voice. Something flickers in his eyes, and he stares at his palms. "And if it's not with me?" He resists.

Wordlessly, she holds out her hand. After a perceptible moment, he reaches into his pocket and passes her a bunged test tube.

"Of course I brought some." He mutters.

She turns around, and begins to drop some of it into each dimple of the spot plate. The liquid is murky, dirty and for a moment she is seized by a strong desire to smash the test tube against the wall. But she continues on, adding a different chemical to each bit of the drug.

"These are just basic tests of course, and I'll need to do some more in depth analysis." She explains unnecessarily, needing to fill the silence, the feeling of an intense stare on her back. Turning back to him, she adds, "They'll take a couple of minutes, so I'll just check your vitals."

She hooks up the electrodes of the heart monitor to his wrists, wraps a blood pressure cuff around his wrist. His skin is feverish, and his veins are too prominent, too green, too fragile. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and keeps going, trying not to tremble. At her touch, he closes his eyes and leans his head back against the bed pillow, and for a few minutes, he finds some semblance of peace.

She moves back to her seat, tapping her pen against the notebook, waiting for the glaring results on the glaring screens.

"Picking Twitter fights, then?" She attempts to make her voice light-hearted, and as his eyes open again she sees he doesn't buy it, but it is a relief for him to play along.

"Oh yes." His eyes gleam, "It's beautiful. Poking a hornet's nest without any danger of being stung."

Her mouth turns upwards, "Well that remains to be seen. But I suppose your wall is happy that your anger is taken out on something else."

"Well," He looks shifty, "That was the case until...today."

She shakes her head in utter bemusement, and they pretend for a moment that they are not in a vehicle of the dead and the dying, and that he is not slowly disintegrating, and that her heart is not breaking for him.

The beep of the machines shatters the facade, brings them back to piercing reality. Her face collapses at the initial readings, because she had been expecting bad, but she had not been prepared for total self-annihilation.

"God." She breathes heavily, something hard pricking her eyes, something hard coiling in her stomach. "Oh my God, oh my God!"

He struggles to sit up, to reach out to her, but she is turning away to the damning colours that had formed in the wells, to the chemicals that did not lie.

"Even from a few basic tests, the concentrations in this, of methadone, of cocaine...what it's doing to your body." She presses her fingers to her lips, her voice trembling, "This isn't recreational, it's _destructive_." He stops moving, looks at her, and doesn't say a thing.

"Why?" She whispers.

"Always the same reason." He stares at the colours, mockingly bright. "Because I was bored, because my mind is too loud and..." He falters, "No-one else was louder."

"I know that, I've always known that." She swallows, attempts to begin again -

"My friend was murdered," He interrupts angrily, "Don't I get a free pass, just this once?"

"No!" She explodes, "No, I meant, why didn't you come to me? Why didn't you let me-", her voice cracks, "- help you?"

He doesn't flinch at her anger, but he does at the sheer helplessness beneath it. He had pictured her many a time in those blurred moments between one fix and the next, but the betrayal and hurt in her eyes at his last substance abused had always followed – a constant reminder. With her, he thinks, the right words are so hard to find, but perhaps – he sees the unwavering gaze, the way she already seems to see right through him – perhaps he needs to find the words that are true instead.

"I had to be by myself." He says slowly, "I... needed to formulate a plan, and the quickest way to get there was, well," Bitterness, self-loathing in his voice, "Something I didn't want you to see."

Her silence lasts so long that he turns his head to look at her, but she eventually nods. He had confirmed her suspicions – the truth of it doesn't hurt any less, but he had shared it with her. Twisting the hair of her ponytail in her hands, she is prepared to award that trust by no longer prying, and so is surprised when she hears his voice again.

Urgently, he demands, "So, why call you here today?"

She looks at him quickly, replies automatically, "Well, it was necessary." She schools her expression, makes her voice matter-of-fact, "John needed someone else to do the health checks."

"A paramedic can do the basic health checks I needed." He gestures around the ambulance, and asks more softly, "So why do you think I called you here?"

She can't trust herself to reply to that, and so instead waits, searching his face.

"Because I realised I can...no longer do this alone. Here," He points to his chest, to what lies beneath it, "And here," he points to his head, "are becoming out of sync, collapsing into each other. So I need John to come with me, and," His hands clutch the side of the bed, as he leans forward, eyes needing her to understand, "You, to remind me why I need to get there."

Her lips part slightly. Oh. The enormity of what his words leave in the air creates a dull ache in her chest.

He sees her face change, become open with vulnerability, with sadness, with something else, but she has understood. So he lies back down once more, sensing every shake in his body with repugnance, yet he allows himself to feel them in front of her, truly soak in the emotions he can never quite cut himself away from.

The walls in the moving vehicle seem too small, too constricted. She moves from the seat to the floor, placing her back against the bed he lies on, her knees curled up to her chest. She cannot bear to face him, cannot let him see the depth of her grief, because one day she is going to lose Sherlock Holmes, and attempting to shelter him, to save him, to change that, would be changing the very essence of the man he is.

Fingers brush against her hair a second, as if trying to catch a thought, but Sherlock's hand falls to his side. He tells her about Culverton Smith, the man this is all for, the man so despicable to him that he forgets about the pain - he could lose it all, fall over the edge, as long as he pulls him over with him.

Eventually, his voice trails off, and she hears his breathing slow. Perhaps he is sleeping, perhaps not. They never touch, but she is somehow extraordinarily aware of the slow rise and fall of his chest, the heat he radiates through the bed's mattress, the slight tremor in his arm that he has stopped fighting. She savours the intimacy, the sure signs that this man is still so very present, so _alive_ , and empties her mind of everything else.

The ambulance without sirens moves through the streets. Their passage to danger, to death perhaps, is not marked by the vehicle's blaring screams; no cars part from their way, nobody on the street turns their heads. It is somehow all the more fitting. For the truest things, they both know, are those left unspoken.

The journey comes to a stop. She opens her notebook again and writes down the full statistics the machines give her, pen held so tightly she almost blots the ink. Reaching over to Sherlock, her fingers dart across his wrists, removing the electrodes, but as she begins to move her hand away, she is stopped. Her eyes widen as his fingers close around hers, rigidly, desperately pressing them together.

"Do you believe me?" He asks quietly.

She doesn't need clarification or elaboration, for she instantly reads it all for herself, as she always does. Yes, he is asking whether she believes him about Smith, believes that it is not a drug induced delusion – but he is also asking if she believes he's not trying to throw his life away, that he understands now the importance of living, that he will try and make it back to her, that he cares for her in his own way, but there are things he needs to untangle.

She knows the answer like she knows her own name. "Yes," She replies just as quietly, "Yes of course I do."

He opens his mouth to say something, but there is nothing adequate for what she has just given him, so he nods and lets her go. The air that moves around her hand again seems cold, mocking, too full of absence. He busies himself with moving off the bed, unravelling the wires, putting away her equipment for her. She sits down on the edge of the ambulance to start the calculations, working out the number of weeks the man she loves has left to live.

They both see John's car pull up.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches his shoulders set, his face pull itself back into its trademark mixture of boredom and bravado, his tremors being resolutely resisted once more. It's hard to bear, but his determination to be brave for John Watson overrules everything else. Though it breaks her heart, she knows that to him he will deny that death can touch him until the last possible minute. For how can his life matter if (in his eyes, never hers) he is responsible for the death of the woman his best friend loved most in the world?

The spell is broken. Life has caught up with the vehicle of the dying.


End file.
